IDS Alert Tuning Question

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Josh Silvestro

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May 22, 2018, 10:32:40 AM5/22/18
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Hello! Looking for ideas or whatever anyone else is currently doing. I have an alert firing on the network:

"MALWARE-OTHER dns request with long host name segment - possible data exfiltration attempt"


This is a F/P and needs tuned out. I DO NOT want to disable the alert, but the two IPs are internal IPs and the firewall, so as far as tuning it out in the threshold[.]conf, not possible . . . to my knowledge.

It's triggering on a DNS request from our networks anti-virus. So it'd be great to tune that URL out.

Coming from a Splunk background the first thing I thought was to just tune out the URL. In Splunk we have searches that look for IDS alerts then | (pipe) them in to further searches for more detail opposed to just the IDS alert, but unfortunately Elastic doesn't work that way (but hopefully will in the future).

So any advice on keeping the alert enabled but still suppressing for the URL?

Philip Robson

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May 22, 2018, 3:32:30 PM5/22/18
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Sophos AV by any chance?

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Philip Plantamura

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May 22, 2018, 4:08:00 PM5/22/18
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Josh: 
If it's just a few domains, you can exclude the specific domains by modifying the signature with /etc/nsm/pulledpork/modifysid.conf
Phil

On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 3:32 PM, 'Philip Robson' via security-onion <securit...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Sophos AV by any chance?
On Tue, 22 May 2018, 15:32 'Josh Silvestro' via security-onion, <security-onion@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Hello! Looking for ideas or whatever anyone else is currently doing. I have an alert firing on the network:

"MALWARE-OTHER dns request with long host name segment - possible data exfiltration attempt"


This is a F/P and needs tuned out. I DO NOT want to disable the alert, but the two IPs are internal IPs and the firewall, so as far as tuning it out in the threshold[.]conf, not possible . . . to my knowledge.

It's triggering on a DNS request from our networks anti-virus. So it'd be great to tune that URL out.

Coming from a Splunk background the first thing I thought was to just tune out the URL. In Splunk we have searches that look for IDS alerts then | (pipe) them in to further searches for more detail opposed to just the IDS alert, but unfortunately Elastic doesn't work that way (but hopefully will in the future).

So any advice on keeping the alert enabled but still suppressing for the URL?

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Michael Gates

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May 25, 2018, 12:55:37 PM5/25/18
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+1 for me, these Sophos lookups are killing me and suppressing or disabling the alert is not working for some reason.

Philip Robson

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May 25, 2018, 3:26:51 PM5/25/18
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You can modify the rule, believe you add inspect ! = "Sophos.com" something like that


In one of my previous posts I posted my example rule.

Phil

Josh Silvestro

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Jun 5, 2018, 10:04:19 AM6/5/18
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Suppressing the alert has worked for me, but didn't want to disable the whole rule, I'll look at modifying the sig. 

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Thank You,
Joshua Silvestro


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Matt Clairmont

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Jun 5, 2018, 7:44:04 PM6/5/18
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Josh,

There's a few things you can do with Suricata rules for this.
1) If the signature came from ET (ET Pro), you can report the FP to them with the domain it's firing on or include a pcap for them so they can easily check their changes.

2) You can do a content negation for the dns name. DNS signatures in Suricata can be a bit tricky sometimes as they can do a very detailed subdomain comparison but doing a full content:!"<domain>" may work for you. If you do this, you should put the rule in your local.rules file so it stays more permanant until ET (if that's where it came from) can fix it. If you change the rule, then it gets a revision that doesn't include the fix, your changes will be lost.

Here's the negation section of the Suricata documentation. They're awesome at documenting how to building custom signatures.
http://suricata.readthedocs.io/en/suricata-4.0.4/rules/differences-from-snort.html#negated-content-match-special-case

Matt Clairmont

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Jun 5, 2018, 7:52:12 PM6/5/18
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Mike,

How have you been attempting to disable the rule?

Michael Gates

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Jun 7, 2018, 11:59:20 AM6/7/18
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Matt,

It was my error, I was using the wrong gen_id in my suppress statement

On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 6:52 PM, Matt Clairmont <matthew.c...@gmail.com> wrote:
Mike,

How have you been attempting to disable the rule?
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Josh

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Jun 14, 2018, 5:07:52 PM6/14/18
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Josh,

I, too, am looking to modify 30881:3. However, at the top of the modifysid.conf file it says "Note that this will only work with GID:1 rules, simply because modifying GID:3 stub rules would not actually affect the rule, thusly it will remain non modifyable!"

30881 says that it is a "gid:3" rule. It seems that modifying this rule will not work by changing it in modifysid.conf.

Other than suppression, have you found a way to effectively mute this rule for the sophos (or other long domain name) domains?

--Josh

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